free hand and foot. I tried the door on my car.
“It’s locked,” he shouted.
“So’s this one,” I called back. “What now?”
He looked around the side of the car. “Swing in between the cars. There’s a small platform on either side of the link that you can stand on. And watch your feet.”
I followed his lead and moved gingerly off the ladder and onto a two-foot-wide iron footing, taking my hand off the rung only when I was certain I was secure. McGinnes now faced me across the link that connected our cars. The ground below was a blur that rushed away.
We rode the train for a couple of hours, through smallish towns and low-activity yards and back through woods and clearings. When we crossed a bridge over a wide creek, McGinnes pointed to the moon’s reflection on the still water. In one of the railroad yards a dog barked at us briefly. In another, an outline of a man waved slowly.
When we were again in the middle of a long stretch of woods, McGinnes suggested we get off the train. “It feels like we’re slowing down,” he said, and looked out from between the cars and back at me. “What you want to do is, move back out to the outside ladder. When I tell you, jump off and away from the train. Lean back to counter your momentum, and when you hit, take long strides until you slow down.”
“I’ll watch you,” I said.
We moved out to the sides of our cars. The night air had grown cooler. McGinnes waited for a long while until the land gradually leveled out. Then he pushed away from the train, landed on his feet, and slowed to a jog.
I was concentrating on jumping away from the train—it seemed then to be the main objective—and threw myself way out, realizing as I did that my upper body was far ahead of my legs. My feet barely touched the gravel. I rolled until I was stopped by a log and some brush. When McGinnes helped me up, I was a little dazed but relieved.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, though my back already ached and I could feel a deep scrape below my knee as it rubbed against my jeans.
The caboose passed and with it the noise, leaving only the quiet of the woods. We watched the last of it enter a curve ahead and disappear into the night.
WE WALKED ON THE tracks in the moonlight, keeping in the direction of the train. He looked at the stars and claimed we were heading northwest. I didn’t dispute it as it seemed irrelevant in any case. I was becoming tired and ornery.
“I don’t know how you talk me into this shit,” I said.
“Relax, will you?” McGinnes stopped me with his hand on my chest. “I bet you can’t even tell me what you did a week ago today. But when you’re drooling in your wheelchair in forty years, you’ll remember this night—the way the woods smell right now, the sound of the train. That rush you got when you were running across the clearing. This is happening, man, this is what’s important. Everything else is bullshit.”
We walked on. I related the course of events from the day Pence had called to the present, leaving out nothing. McGinnes was unusually attentive as he listened. At one point he began coughing furiously, then retched and spit up something bilious. I sat on the tracks and waited until he was ready to continue.
Sometime after midnight we reached a railroad yard and found an office with a washroom, where an elderly man let us get some water and clean up. Then we walked into an adjoining town, found its main road, and put our thumbs out.
An hour after that the driver of a jacked-up Malibu slowed and pulled over. McGinnes looked in the passenger window, pointed me to the back seat, and hopped in front.
A young serviceman was behind the wheel. He checked me out in the rearview, looking slightly apprehensive at the sight of my marked face.
“Where you guys headed?” he asked.
“Elizabeth City,” McGinnes said.
“Elizabeth City?” He laughed. “Hell, you’re in Virginia!”
McGinnes looked back at me and then at the kid. “Where in Virginia?”
“Franklin area,” the kid said. “What are you, lost?”
“We hopped a train,” McGinnes said proudly.
“No shit!” the kid said.
“Damn straight!” McGinnes said, turning his head slightly so I could see his wink. “What you got in this thing, a three-oh-seven?”
“Yeah,” he said sheepishly and added, “but it moves.”
“Good